Reformation & Confessional Split

The United Provinces, Frisian freedoms, the VOC/WIC and the Dutch Golden Age.

1 chapter

1100 - 1520

The Hanseatic League transformed IJssel-valley towns—Deventer, Zwolle, Kampen, Doesburg, Zutphen—into wealthy trade hubs connected to the Baltic and North Sea networks. Salt, grain, cloth, and beer flowed through their ports and warehouses; city walls, gates, and merchant houses still bear witness to this prosperity. In Deventer, Geert Groote (1340-1384) founded the Devotio Moderna, a movement of personal piety that spread through the very same Hanseatic trade routes and profoundly shaped religious life across Northern Europe—preparing the ground for the Reformation even though it was itself a Catholic reform. The wealth and piety of this era produced the grand parish churches and civic institutions that anchored kermis and guild celebrations in the liturgical calendar. Each town's patron saint—St. Martin in Doesburg, St. Nicholas in the Bergkwartier—determined its kermis date, a calendar anchor that often survives today even after the religious meaning has faded.

1648 - 1795

Under the Dutch Republic, the Reformed Church was the official state religion, but Catholic worship was tolerated—grudgingly in cities, more openly in the countryside. In Twente, Catholic parishes continued their liturgical calendar openly enough to maintain Easter traditions like the vlöggelen and Palmpasen; the earliest documentary reference to vlöggelen dates to 1840, but a pastor noted in 1895 that people had been 'vlöggeling' since time immemorial. In Protestant Salland and the Veluwe, kermis dates survived but shed their saint-day meanings; festivals followed agricultural seasons instead. William III built Paleis Het Loo (from 1684) on the Veluwe as a royal hunting lodge, anchoring the Orange dynasty in the eastern landscape and symbolizing the Protestant state's presence. The confessional map drawn in this era is still legible in which festivals carry liturgical meaning and which have become purely civic or seasonal celebrations.

768 - 1100

The Carolingian empire pushed Christianity into Saxon lands east of the IJssel, beginning with the Anglo-Saxon missionary Lebuinus who crossed the river in 768 to preach among the Saxons. Charlemagne's Saxon Wars (772-804) forcibly incorporated the region into the Frankish realm and imposed Christian worship on a reluctant population. Parish churches rose on pagan sites, each dedicated to a patron saint whose feast day became the village's kermis—the word itself derived from kerk-mis (church-mass). The parish network laid down in this era still shapes festival calendars: even where kermis has long since secularized, its date often still marks the original saint's day, encoding the founding moment of each community's ritual life.

1795 - 1965

The Industrial Revolution came to Twente as a cotton-textile boom. From the 1830s, Enschede and Hengelo filled with spinning mills and weaving sheds; population quintupled between 1870 and 1900. Textile families like Van Heek and Jannink built an industrial oligarchy, and Catholic priests like Alfons Ariëns (from 1891) organized workers into Catholic trade unions, creating a distinctive Catholic worker culture that reinforced parish identity and festival participation. The industry collapsed in the 1960s, erasing some 30,000 jobs. The Achterhoek, poorer and more rural, developed its own community traditions: the Bloemencorso Lichtenvoorde was founded in 1929 as part of the kermis, splitting from the schutterij. In the Kop van Overijssel, the Corso Vollenhove began in 1905 as a peaceful alternative to the kermis fair. Dialect—Twents, Achterhoeks, Sallands—remained the language of the factory floor, the farm, and the festival announcement, anchoring festival life in a linguistic world separate from standard Dutch.